Here’s another popular rule that rarely enhances safety….All identifying credentials…are above the waist….A young child cannot tell the difference between a police officer and a security guard….I don’t believe in teaching inflexible rules because it’s not possible to know they’ll apply in all situations. There is one, however, that reliably enhances safety. Teach children that if they are ever lost, Go to a woman.

Why? First, if your child selects a woman, it’s highly unlikely that the woman will be a sexual predator….Next…a woman approached by a lost child asking for help is likely to stop whatever she is doing, commit to that child, and not rest until the child is safe….The fact is that men in all cultures and at all ages and at all times in history are more violent than women.

This is a pretty damning piece of advice, resting on an equally damning evidentiary foundation. Think about it: when giving advice to your child on how to look for help when they are lost, you don’t need to specify–in your directive to your child that they approach a woman for help–a policewoman, an older woman, a younger woman, a black woman, a white woman. Any of these will be, on the odds, safer than any man you could specify as a type. Look for a woman; you will be guaranteed that you will find a ‘safer human being’ than a man. An escaped female convict or criminal of some kind might be more dangerous than many men, but the relevant odds still make it the case that the advice under consideration retains its rationality. Look for a woman, and you are at least partially on your way to safety. There are no guarantees, of course. Women rob, rape, and kill too; but we act on the basis of probabilities and the probability is that your child–if helplessly looking for succor–will be safer with a woman than with a man.

I’m not sure how men, as a gender, can, need, or should respond to this kind of claim; it isn’t clear to me what form such a response could take. Still, at the least, this should induce some kind of reckoning–men have, through their actions over the years, made themselves into the more dangerous gender. I read the passage above as a parent, and I did not hesitate to internalize its advice and transmit it to my daughter. She knows, that if she is ever lost, she should go looking for someone that looks ‘like a mommy.’ That was the only specificity we could add to the advice and we qualified it with ‘if you don’t find a mommy, find a girl.’ We still did not tell her to approach a man, and the fact is, we won’t. It’s just too dangerous to tell my child to ever trust any kind of male stranger; even if she is lost. She should hold out for a woman.

If a season of violence can establish a just social system and can create the possibilities of its preservation, there is no purely ethical reason upon which violence and revolution can be ruled out.

Kirsch then goes on to note:

[B]y the end of the book, Niebuhr has retreated from [this position] somewhat. In theory violence might be justified, he argues, but in practice the American proletariat has no more chance of winning a revolutionary struggle than do American blacks. For both of these disinherited groups, Niebuhr concludes, confrontational nonviolence on the Gandhian model is the best course: “Non-violence is a particularly strategic instrument for an oppressed group which is hopelessly in the minority and has no possibility of developing sufficient power to set against its oppressors.”

Here, Niebuhr argues that political violence is ethically permissible but, given a concrete socio-political situation like the American polity–one with its particular material circumstances pertaining to matters like the power and reach of its law enforcement apparatus, the material deprivation of its underclasses, and the fragmented relationship between them–tactically inadvisable. This is an interesting and important concession and qualification–especially coming from someone like Niebuhr who, because of his status as a Christian theologian, might be imagined to have some predisposition to ruling out violence on ethical grounds.

For what Niebuhr has conceded here, of course, is that in a different socio-political context, political violence might well be tactically advisable. Perhaps the relevant oppressed classes are more politically united–they have been able to build alliances geared toward revolutionary action; perhaps they are better equipped in material terms–with access to mass media and communication and reliable means of economic support. (In the American context, access to ‘weaponry’ takes on a whole new meaning given the militarization of its law enforcement forces and the proliferation of privately owned guns.) Viewed in this fashion, Niebuhr’s views take on a far more pragmatic hue: Revolution and revolutionary violence is a political business; it aims to change the distribution of power in a particular polity; its advisability is a matter of strategy and tactics; nonviolence, in some contexts, may have more revolutionary potential; in yet others, violence may suggest itself as a better political strategy.

Because I have no prima facie case to make against violence as a political tactic per se, I unsurprisingly find myself in agreement with Niebuhr. Doing politics and achieving political ends requires a toolbox; the more varied its contents, the better, for they are more likely to accommodate a diversity of polities and material political contexts. Those tools find their place in our bag of tricks according to how ‘well’ they work. This ‘wellness’ can be judged in several dimensions; perhaps violence will be judged inadvisable in some context–as above–precisely because it offers little to no chance of success or threatens to produce too many undesirable knock-on effects. Whatever the case may be, our evaluation of our political options proceeds on pragmatic grounds. So-called a priori, ‘foundational,’ ‘first principles’ arguments against our political tools have no place here.

Every year, every semester, there they are: the barely visible, the unobtrusive, the ones who hardly register, who barely leave a trace. There they are, every semester, filing into my classroom, sometimes staking out corner positions, sometimes not. (Sometimes they will attend, sometimes not.) They will not speak, they will show varying amounts of interest in classroom proceedings; they seem curiously bemused by, detached from, all that seems to be taking place around them. I try to reach out, sometimes with carrot, sometimes with stick. My success rates remain mixed. Every semester, some students come and go, and as finals and grading come and go too, I realize we could both say about each other, “I hardly knew ye.”

I do not think these students are just slackers or anything like that. Many, I’m sure, are introverted, shy, withdrawn, reluctant to speak up in a room full of strangers and a person of authority and risk their silent ridicule; yet others are victims of a bureaucratic arrangement which ensures that they have registered for a class because it was: a) an onerous degree requirement whose rationale they do not understand; b) an eligible elective that worked with their work-and-personal-and academic schedule. Whatever the reason, the student in question is present, and yet not.

Every semester, some measure of guilt and self-doubt with regards to this situation afflicts me: Did I try hard enough to reach out to the student concerned to find out how they were finding the readings and class discussions? Did I just concern myself with the ‘easy cases’ and shrink from the true pedagogical challenge at hand? I feel this especially acutely because I know that on many occasions someone who has seemed quiet and distant all semester long will suddenly reveal, in the course of a one-on-one conversation in my office–perhaps following a paper review session or something like that–that great depths lurk beneath that placid exterior. Sometimes it is evidence of a sparked interest in, and actual engagement with, the readings and classroom discussion; sometimes a minor personal remark will help me realize why this student maintains the distance he or she does. On these kinds of occasions, I feel a flush of shame run through me for having thought unkindly about this human being–one as conflicted and confused as me.

Whatever the reason for this failure to establish communication and contact with my students, every semester ends with some melancholia and regret on my part. I will probably not see them again; they will go on their own way. We spent fourteen weeks together, meeting twice a week for seventy-five minutes, but we didn’t ‘get to know each other.’ I sense an opportunity lost, one never to return. I know I’m a finite being with finite resources of interest and energy–intellectual and emotional; sometimes I do not have enough to take on board all the challenges my student raise. I know that as a teacher, I’m supposed to play additional roles as well–an amateur therapist and social worker at times. Failure in those roles needn’t be an indictment of me as a teacher but I wonder if I fail in the basic human dimension of failing to show interest in those who come into contact with me for an extended period of time. It’s a thought I will take forward with me to the next semester, already visible on the horizon as this one winds down.

On Friday, Carolyn and I met at EMS in North Conway, got our gear together (ice tools, crampons, a climbing rack; I already owned a helmet, harness, and mountaineering boots), and discussed objectives and expectations for the day. Once set, a short drive brought us to Crawford Notch from where our ascent to Mt. Willard began. A short approach hike brought us to the lower section of Hitchcock Gully, which required some moderate snow climbing. From there on, we traversed to the right across some snow covered rock slabs to Left Hand Monkey Wrench for our first ice climb; this was a good learning experience for me (though I didn’t help matters by dropping an ice screw while dismantling an anchor; I had to rappel down to bring it back up, a mortifying experience.) Thereafter, we moved on to The Cleft; the crux move on this involves moving over the Chockstone, a boulder that blocks the slot and presents an interesting obstacle. It took me several tries to get over this and my final move was an undignified one that saw me plant my face right in the snow. Good times. Thereafter, a short climb brought us to the Mt. Willard summit trail from where we made a right to head back to the car. (A short walk would have taken us to the summit, but time was running out–thanks to my learning curve on removing anchors, tying clove-hitch knots etc–so to avoid the dark, we high-tailed it.) All in all, a very satisfying day.

On Saturday, we dropped our plans for Mt. Webster and headed instead to the Silver Cascade–a frozen stream bed and falls–for some more ice climbing. The snow here was quite thick, making our movements quite slow at times. Still, the ice climbing was relatively easy and enjoyable. We headed up for a bit, exploring the Cascade’s different features before finally calling it a day and bushwhacking it back down to the road.

Below: Climbing in the Silver Cascade:

I’ve still got a very long way to go on winter climbing; I’m still struggling with moving smoothly and keeping all the various pieces–equipment, clothing, my body–together. Still, it was an amazing experience to be able to make progress on some alpine skills, and I look forward to putting these together on some bigger routes in the future.

In so doing, they did what the residents of any other city do these days when attacked by unknown assailants: they went back to doing what they do on a day like any other. They are, in this regard, not unique or particularly distinctive; they do what all humans do in the face of incipient trauma, seek a return to normalcy as quickly as possible. Nevertheless, this was occasion for more self-congratulatory noise about how New Yorkers, of all folks, are particularly unfazed by catastrophe. (Yes, this compliment is directed at me, and yes, I’m declining it.)

I have made note here on this blog, before, how we valorize these kinds of everyday responses when they are displayed by folks who are of some relevance or importance to us; we are far less inclined to make such attributions to distant folks. Those failures of attribution result in a failure of humanity; we fail to notice that carrying on in the face of disaster is what we humans do in order to survive and carry on; all human beings do this. There is nothing special about French, English, American resilience in the face of disaster; just like there is nothing special or particularly stoic about Asian or African equanimity in the face of massive political or ecological disruption. We should be sensitive to trauma induced by such catastrophes but we should not be surprised by the human capacity to recover, to endure, to even thrive and flourish. This capacity of ours is what makes us into survivors; it is how we are able to take on the good with the bad and live.

By persistently only paying attention to the resiliency of those like us, who look like us, who live near to us, we fail to establish a broader bond of empathetic experience and suffering; we fail to notice that we are united by how well we are all able to take on board that which the world puts on our plates. The misfortunes which presently serve as occasion for us to point how strong we are, how distinctive, how unique, should serve instead to make note of how, in our responses, we are like human beings everywhere, confronted with the basic facts of our existence: that life goes on, even as lives and worlds do not. It is a lesson every grieving person learns; it is one of the clearest reminders of our humanity.

Like this:

This semester, in my Landmarks in Philosophy class, I used Thomas Szasz‘s The Myth of Mental Illness as one of the three texts on the reading list (The other two were Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman and William James’ Pragmatism.) Szasz’s argument that mental illness does not exist, that psychiatry is a pseudo-science was, as might be expected, fairly controversial; critics accused him of overstating his case and of drawing too sharp a boundary between the physical and the mental. Be that as it may, there are many, many acute insights in Szasz’s work; these continue to make reading his work a useful experience for any philosophy student.

Among these insights, in no particular order, are the following:

1. Reducing the mental to the physical comes at a cost of explanatory power. Especially when such reduction is merely offered in the form of a promissory note; many existing behavioral disorders still lack physical correlates in neurophysiology. The languages of the mental and the ethical often offer us richer and more useful explanations for understanding our fellow human beings than the language of the physical; many phenomena of social and ethical interest ‘vanish’ when subjected to the lens of the physical.

2. The so-called ‘mentally ill’ are engaged in a species of communication with us; it behooves us to try to translate their ‘speech.’ This leads to a consideration of a hierarchy of languages and a study of the metalanguage and object language distinction.

3. The category ‘mentally ill’ functions, all too often, as a catch-all category used to lump in socially undesirable behavior; what counts as desirable and undesirable is clearly a function of existing social prejudices. The infamous DSM criteria often encapsulate such prejudices; unsurprisingly these need to be revised over time to accommodate such inclinations. (Remember that Dostoyevsky’s ‘Underground Man‘ was a ‘sick man.’)

4. A game-playing and rule-following model of human behavior offers us interesting and useful interpretations of social situations and interactions within them. (Wittgenstein’s notion of language as a kind of social game immediately comes to mind here and allows for a fruitful investigation of this claim.)

5. Medicine functions within a social, economic, political, and ethical context; the rights of patients and healers emerge within this context. We should expect medicine to be practiced differently–with different medical outcomes–in different contexts. From this, a larger point about the social construction of science, scientific practice, and scientific knowledge can be seen to follow; the boundaries of science are very often informed by social and legal considerations. Consider, for instance, the testing of cosmetic products or new drugs on laboratory animals, experimental procedures which stand and fall depending on whether they have received legal sanction from the surrounding legal regime.

6. The autonomy and personality of the patient is a moral good worthy of respect; the practice of medicine and the relationship between the doctor and patient should be cognizant of this. (The notion of ‘informed consent’ in modern bioethics can be seen to be powerfully informed by such a consideration.)

Over at the New York Times, Ken Englehart, “a lawyer specializing in communications law, is a senior adviser for StrategyCorp, an adjunct professor at Osgoode Hall Law School and a senior fellow at the C. D. Howe Institute” offers us an astonishing argument suggesting we not worry about the FCC’s move to repeal Net Neutrality. It roughly consists of saying “Don’t worry, corporations will do right by you.” Englehart accepts that the concerns raised by opponents of the FCC–” getting rid of neutrality regulation will lead to a “two-tier” internet: Internet service providers will start charging fees to websites and apps, and slow down or block the sites that don’t pay up…users will have unfettered access to only part of the internet, with the rest either inaccessible or slow”–have some merit for he makes note of abuses by ISPs that confirm just those fears. But he just does not think we need worry that ISPs will abuse their new powers:

[T]hese are rare examples, for a reason: The public blowback was fierce, scaring other providers from following suit. Second, blocking competitors to protect your own services is anticompetitive conduct that might well be stopped by antitrust laws without any need for network neutrality regulations.

How reassuring. “Public blowback” seems unlikely to have any effect on the behavior of folks who run quasi-monopolies. Moreover, the idea that we might should trust our ISPs to not indulge in behavior that “might well be stopped by antitrust laws” also sounds unlikely to assuage any concerns pertaining to the abuse of ISP powers. It gets better, of course:

Net-neutrality defenders also worry that some service providers could slow down high-data peer-to-peer traffic, like BitTorrent. And again, it has happened, most notably in 2007, when Comcast throttled some peer-to-peer file sharing.

But it’s still good:

So why am I not worried? I worked for a telecommunications company for 25 years, and whatever one may think about corporate control over the internet, I know that it simply is not in service providers’ interests to throttle access to what consumers want to see. Neutral broadband access is a cash cow; why would they kill it?

Because service providers will make all the money they need by providing faster services to premium customers and not give a damn about the plebes?

But don’t worry:

[T]here’s still competition: Some markets may have just one cable provider, but phone companies offer increasingly comparable internet access — so if the cable provider slowed down or blocked some sites, the phone company could soak up the affected customers simply by promising not to do so.

Or they could collude, with both charging high prices because they know customers have nowhere to go?

Is this the best defenders of the FCC can do? The old ‘market pressures will make corporations behave’ pony trick? Englehart’s cleverest trick, I will admit, is the aside that “the current net neutrality rule was put in place by the Obama administration.” That’s a good dog-whistle to blow. Anything done by the Obama administration is worth repealing by anyone connected with this administration. And their cronies, like Englehart.